Al Jazeera installs Teracue tech in UK studio

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Al Jazeera Media Network recently moved to its new UK studio in London, located in the ‘shard’ skyscraper, and the broadcaster is again using Teracue IPTV solutions to distribute TV channels. So far it is the fifth installation at the Al Jazeera Media Network using IPTV solutions provided by Teracue.

Al Jazeera Media Network is using DVB-to-IP Gateways from the DMM-Series For signal ingest of more than 60 TV and radio channels. The DMM-Series receive DVB signals via satellite, cable or terrestrial and convert them to IP streams. Using the common interface, which is standard on all DMM modules, decryption of encrypted signals is possible as well. SDI feeds coming from the studios are encoded directly at the CAR using Teracues HD Encoder, the ENC-300-HDSDI and distributed to the IPTV network.

Using the modular and pure hardware based Teracue solutions for signal ingest an extremely high operational reliability is reached.

Decoding of the IPTV streams is done using Amino IPTV set-top-boxes with special Teracue software installed. This means it is possible to monitor and control all STBs from a central management system.

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The heart of monitoring and remote control of the STBs is the Element Manager software. The STBs can be controlled separately or combined in groups using single commands or presets. If a main management system or automation is to be used, the Element Manager will work as an interface to connect the IPTV solution to the main control system. API’s for the most renowned control / automation systems are available.

Additionally to the IPTV STBs the StreamView series of multi viewers are used to provide a mosaic view to screens. StreamView is able to decode several streams simultaneously and display these streams in different layouts. StreamView can be controlled from a central location as well. It is possible to switch dedicated streams to full screen and select audio to be routed to the speaker or mute it.

To provide IPTV functionality to the employees, XPlayer software is used. Specially designed for streaming application XPlayer can be used as standalone player or embedded to websites as an ActiveX element.